The founder of the groundbreaking literary award says it 'sells books like no other prize' and won't be stopping any time soon. This year it has a new sponsor – and an incredibly strong shortlist
She has just arrived back from a busy book tour on the other side of the world, but author Kate Mosse sounds buoyant. The women's prize for fiction – the literary award she co-founded in the mid-90s, in response to an all-male Booker prize shortlist – has found a new sponsor. The prize was supported by Orange until 2012, then kept afloat this year by individuals including Cherie Booth and Martha Lane Fox, and is now entering a three-year partnership with drinks brand Baileys.
The full plans won't be announced until autumn, but the company's ambition for the prize seems to have been the deciding factor for Mosse. She and the other organisers met with more than 20 possible backers, and ended up with a number to choose from. They were looking for one who would "take the prize to another level, so a company that was ambitious and had a global reach," she says.
The idea of extending the prize's international influence comes at the end of an odd, uncertain period in its history. Over the past month especially, following the announcement of what one bookseller called "a staggeringly strong shortlist" for this year's prize, there have been growing murmurs that perhaps an award for women's fiction is no longer necessary. After all, that shortlist includes Hilary Mantel – the first UK author to win the Booker prize twice, and to win both the Booker and Costa in the same year. If Mantel takes home the women's prize on Wednesday, bagging the country's three foremost literary awards for her novel Bring Up The Bodies, it will be an extraordinary first. The list also includes Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver – both of whom have won the women's Pprize in the past decade – as well as the highly lauded AM Homes, Kate Atkinson and Maria Semple. The shortlist's strength comes in a year when Sharon Olds has won the TS Eliot prize for poetry, when all five categories of the Costa prize had female winners, and all three winners of the Commonwealth prizes, announced at the Hay festival a few days ago, were women.
Mosse shrugs off the suggestion that the prize might have become obsolete. "It does make me giggle," she says, "when people tell me it's now one of the most successful prizes in the whole world, and therefore: should we stop it?" She points out the commercial success of the prize's past winners; Andrea Levy's Small Island, Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin, and Smith's On Beauty have all been smash hits. "Every single bookseller says it sells books like no other prize, and then the idea is that therefore you shouldn't do it any more?" She laughs. "But also, it is about a celebration of women's achievements, and to celebrate the best, so why would you stop? This is a literary prize, this is not politics, but saying visibly, internationally, that there are extraordinary women doing extraordinary things, is even more important now. In a world where you have a 15-year-old shot for wanting to learn to read, because she's a girl, saying very visibly 'women's creativity matters' is really important."
It's also true that if you take a few steps back, the literary picture looks nowhere near as glowing as some of this year's prize statistics – so dominated by Mantel – might suggest. The annual Vida count of women's representation in literary journals, for instance, this year once again reported a gaping disparity between the number of male and female authors whose work is reviewed. In the London Review of Books, 73% of the books reviewed are by male authors, 27% by women; in the TLS, 75% are by men, 25% by women – and those are some of the more heartening statistics in that survey. Around the world, depressing statistics regarding women and literature have led to new prizes being set up, which echo the work of the women's prize. This year saw the inaugural Stella prize in Australia, which came about after the country's most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, was accused of being a "sausage fest" (fewer than 30% of Miles Franklin winners have been female, although they're bucking that trend this year with an all-female shortlist). And the fact that only around 11% of winners of the Nobel prize for literature have been women was just one of the statistics cited in the setting up of the Rosalind prize in Canada, which is expected to be awarded for the first time next year.
For Mosse, the award now known as the Baileys women's prize for fiction enables brilliant works of literature to break through to audiences, and remain on the shelves, something that has become much harder in the book trade in the almost 20 years since it started. "It's not about complaining, or being defensive, it's about celebrating the best." I ask whether she would like to see a similar award in other fields where women are under-represented, and she runs quickly through some areas that are still problematic: the theatre, where women are still outnumbered by men, two to one, as actors, artistic directors and writers; the art world, where the proportion of women artists in permanent exhibitions is estimated at around 5%; and the music world, where female composers are still a rarity. Prizes make people question these figures, she says, prompting them to ask whether women just aren't producing work in that field, or other factors are at work. "What prizes do," she says, "if they're set up properly, with a clear purpose, is that rather than complaining about the status quo, they change the status quo. Things do not change on their own, and they never have done."
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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